Sturmey Archer 3 Speed Shifter: Make a new Cover Plate

It's common for the cover plate on the ubiquitous Sturmey Archer shifter to fall off and disappear. It leaves behind a sticky mess on the plastic top like this:

I find it easiest to remove the goo with a bit of paraffin on a rag, then wash up with soapy water, and dry, leaving a clean plastic top:

From this, you need to make a suitable replacement cover plate. If I had some tracing paper, that would probably work, but I didn't so instead used a bit of water paint to stamp the shape on to paper:

Cut this out carefully, trimming so that it fits nicely in within the raised border of the plastic cap:

Use the paper template to cut out a replacement cover plate out of a suitable material. In this case, I decided to go for 1.5mm thick birch ply, because I had some handy:

 After some deft scissor and sandpaper work, you end up with this:

Which I then brushed with 2 coats of clear varnish, wrote on the numbers and gave it another coat of varnish. Turned it over and applied some double sided sticky tape to the underside:

And finally, below a pic of the finished item on the bike. Obviously, one can take as much time as one likes on this kind of thing. I also removed the rust from the round head bolt that fixes it down. Now I can't help imagining a tortoiseshell or mother of pearl cover plate...